Ferdinand de Saussure
I: Introduction
Beginning very early in his career, Ferdinand de Saussure was gripped by he problem of uncovering what are the basic data that linguistics ought to ground itself in and what, essentially, is human speech? He never wavered from that quest throughout his career.
In 1878, at the age of 21, he published the Dissertation on the Primitive System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages. In it he attacked the foundations of the comparative grammar school of Franz Bopp and his followers. The comparative approach was at this time extremely fruitful and robust. But Saussure wanted to know something elementary: what is this rich and fruitful comparative history a history of? What changes and what remains the same? Indeed, in his dissertation he formulated and attempted to address questions that did not yet exist in the field. We learn from his preface that he had intended, modestly and like a good novice scientist, to study only the Indo-European a. However, his studies irresistibly led him to consider “the system of vowels as a whole.” This was unexplored territory. He himself, again in his premise, states that there is no elementary data for such a study and that without this data “everything wavers, everything is arbitrariness and incertitude.” His future research was a quest for this missing data. But the search would be painful. To the end of his life he would pursue the “elementary data” without there would only be “arbitrariness and uncertainty.” He could not yet clearly conceive of what it was that at bottom constituted language. And the linguists of the time more or less ignored de Saussure’s call for a rational basis to historical and comparative linguistics.
Saussure was searching for a way to reach what was historically concrete. How could it be said that a linguistic phenomenon seen at two moments of evolution was the same phenomenon? Of what would its sameness consist? Saussure saw with increasing clarity that definitions were require.
In his dissertation Saussure had discerned several types of a in the Indo-European languages. Now, he tried to clearly delineate the basic features of the a just as a physicist would attempt to delineate the basic feature of an atomic particle. However, de Saussure could only sort out two specific traits; it was related to neither e nor o and it had a dual role being both vocalic and consonantal. To help find a coherence to these data he described the a as a phoneme and he did not say how it was pronounced, what sound it approximated, or even if it was a vowel or a consonant. This purely procedural detail would escape the attention of linguists for some time to come. What Saussure was delineating was something insubstantial. Phonic substantiality was no longer considered. The a was to be an algebraic element, a term in a system, whose distinguishing value was oppositional. In 1903, twenty five years after the publication of the Dissertation, a pupil of de Saussure wrote An Introduction to the Comparative Study of Indo-European Languages. This was the first major work that indicated the direction and the wealth of potential contained in the Dissertation of 1878.
As for Saussure himself, his career took him to Paris where he continued his research.
In 1927, the linguist J. Kurylowicz discovered in the Hittite language, disguised under the written h, the Indo-European a. Saussure’s theoretical entity was now a reality. New studies in the field of sonantic coefficients were undertaken. Saussure, however, gradually withdrew into secrecy after pursuing some exceptional studies on Baltic intonaniton. A career was established for him but his productivity slowed down. His circle of colleagues grew smaller and smaller and he eventually confined himself to meeting only with close friends. He continued to work nonetheless. He had come to feel that a radical revision was required in the entire field of linguistics. But he himself did not feel he had established the ground for such a revision and so he did not publish. His goal, he said, was to show the linguist “what he is doing” and to show the “ineptness” of current linguistic terminology. Indeed, he wrote in a letter that “there is not a single term used in linguistics to which I grant any meaning whatsoever.” The facts of language would have to be completely re-ordered for a new science to be born.
Now, at this time, huge efforts were being conducted by the comparativists in the organization of comparative materials and in the stocks of etymologies that were being compiled. There was simply no time left over for theory. Saussure would isolate himself and work on the book that would transform the entire discipline. The book would never be written as Saussure felt he had not scrupulously delineated the bases of linguistics. His pupils would cobble together his lecture note into the volume, The Course In General Linguistics, we have today. From his notes we read:
“Elsewhere there are things, certain objects, which one is free to consider afterwards from different points of view. In our case there are, primarily, points of view, right or wrong, but simply points of view, with the aid of which, secondarily, one creates things. These creations happen to correspond to realities when the point of departure is right, or not to correspond to them in the opposite case, but in both cases, no thing, no object, is given for a single instant in itself. Not even when the most material fact is dealt with, one which would seem most obviously defined in itself, as would a series of vocal sounds.
Here is our profession of faith regarding linguistic matter: in other fields one can speak of things from such or such point of view, certain that one will find oneself again on firm ground in the object itself. In linguistics, we deny in principle that there are given objects, that there are things that continue to exist when one passes from one order of ideas to another, and that one can, as a result, allow oneself to consider “things” in several orders, as if they were given by themselves.
That is, human speech is not an entity, not a thing, not a living, evolving organism, nor a spontaneous creation of mind. The ‘object’ that is language is incomparable.
Saussure had begun to grasp that human speech—no matter how it is to be studied—is always a double entity where no one part has value without the other. Upon this intuition the whole of language opens. Everything that is to be studied in language is oppositional; nothing ever resides in one term. Everything in language has to be conceived in double terms.
The general oppositions are:
Sound/sense
Langue/parole
Individual/social
Articulatory/acoustical
Sameness/differences
Synchronic/diachronic
Paradigmatic/syntagmatic
Signifier/signified
Saussure notes: “a is powerless to designate anything whatsoever without the aid of b, and the same thing is true of b without the aid of a.”
What has happened? One can get hold of an isolated vowel sound, of some fragment of an utterance, but it is illusion to think that this is a substance. What remains unconscious and what we must open our eyes to is that any isolated element is preexisted by bonds that determines it. Saussure again:
The more one delves into the material proposed for linguistic study, the more one becomes convinced of this truth, which most particularly—it would be useless to conceal it—makes one pause: the bond established among things is pre-existent, in this area, to the things themselves, and serves to determine them.
Paradoxically, the whole of language, taken as a totality, has to be said to preexist itself. A thing of language does not signify by virtue of its being in some way substantially significant, it signifies by virtue of its formal features which distinguish it from others in its class and which preexist it. Language is that stubborn paradoxical thing in the world that defies our habitual perceptual category of oneness.
The structuralist trend that began around 1928 owes everything to Saussure, although Saussure never used the word “structure” (he spoke of “system”). This work derives from analysis of and exploitation of Saussure’s understanding of linguistics a sub-branch of semiology, the study of signs. For Saussure, the language problem was and remained mainly semiological. Briefly, in anthropology and culture study is has been wondered to what extent the mass of manifest information that confronts the human scientist can be considered as signs and then sorted into binary oppositions. To what extent is a fact of culture significant only insofar as it refers to something other than its manifest content, that is, to what extent is it grafted into oppositional structures: city and country, raw and cooked, nature and culture, east and west… That is, a science of culture seemed feasible for a generation of thinkers and analysts.
Saussure’s death in 1913 was mostly unnoticed and the publication of his Course in 1916 was lost in the frenzy of the War. His place in 20th century thought is assured.
II: The Course In General Linguistics
p7 The thing that constitutes language is unrelated to the phonic character of the linguistic sign.
p8 Linguistics does not study an object given in advance. Speech is both individual and social.
p9 Speech is many-sided and heterogenous—physical, physiological, psychological, social, individual: without unity. But language is a self contained whole and a principle of classification.
p10 What is natural to human speech is not vocalization per se but the general faculty for the constructing of distinct signs hat correspond to distinct ideas. (What is distinctive about human speech is the faculty for distinctions.)
p14 Where speech is heterogenous, language is homogenous: it is a system of signs…a store house of sound images.
p18 Language is like a symphony that is unaltered by the mistakes of individual musicians.
p66 The linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name but a concept and a sound-image.
p67 The bond between signifier and signified is arbitrary. And since the sign is the bond that exists between them, the whole sign is arbitrary. There is no inner relation between the concept sister and the sound-image “sister”. Onomatopoeia: show my t shirt.
p73 The arbitrary nature of the sign protects it from any attempt to modify it. Why? Because it is unmotivated, it is not reasonable and so no reason to modify it.
p74 If there is change it is for the same reason—no reason not to change as the sign is unmotivated, unreasonable, arbitrary.
p75 Language is not a mechanism arranged with a view to the concepts to be expressed.
p102-3 The linguistic entity again is only the associating of the signifier with the signified. Like H2O, taken apart contain none of the properties of water.
p107 Language has that strange characteristic of not having entities that are perceptible at the outset and yet not permitting us to doubt that they exist.
p112 The combination of idea and sound produce a form, not a substance.
p113 The bond is arbitrary. “Language can be compared to a sheet of paper: thought is the front and sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time…”
p118 a segment of language can never be based on anything except its non-coincidence with the rest; arbitrary and differential are two correlative qualities.
p119 ‘t’ can be written in different ways, there is no connect to the sound it designates. The point is to distinguish it from ‘l’ or ‘d’ or ‘p’
p120 “Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the sd or the sf language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system.”
“ A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values; and this system serves as the effective link between the phonic and psychological elements within each sign.”’ I.e. the bar sf / sd is the system.
III: Discussion
What is happening here? S. is staking out new territory, creating a new discipline. Language is a system. I can’t just point to things out of the blue. Pointing is already part of language. Language is not personal but social, it pre-exists the individual speaker who must enter it.
System=cannot be reduced to a mathematical sum total of all speech acts but to a sum total of all possible relations/distinctions. Where ever there is a distinction there is always already a system and hence an intelligibility. To be is to be intelligible within a system. (In Wittgenstein there are many systems competing with each other; the “language games.”)
The system is social psychology, not individual psychology. Not a collective unconscious however but forms without contents.
p14 of The Course describes the sf/sd as a contract but p71 he takes it back because we do not really “agree” to engage the system.
LANGUE: system, structure, language proper
PAROLE: individual speech acts, arbitrary, temporal
Thought does not pre-exist language, language precedes thought. Language is not created to express ideas. Language is not a tool. I am the tool of language. There is language instead of thought.
You can’t have a sd without a sf; but they are not of the same order. The sf has a power of its own; the sf “hails” the sf and can refer to many sds.
Is the sf a form? Is the sd a substance? A form? The whole sign is a form? Is it positive or negative? It is “positively negative”. But the sd is a product of the play of sfs. X is only not y, not z…
What is characteristic of human being, for Saussure, is not the pure simple having of language, or speaking, as in Aristotle. Unlike the animal that is born with its voice, man has no voice and instead, more narrowly, has the capacity to constitute a system of differences and distinctions. Language is not a function of the speaking subject, to the contrary, the speaking subject is a function of language. The phoneme is essentially not at all phonic. The sd is a concept woven of differences from other concepts—it is a schema-image; the sf is a sound-image. The relative usefulness of the system means that language has become an economics. It is an exchange of values of similar and dissimilar. I exchange “horse” for the dissimilar concept ‘horse’ and for the similar sound-image “house.” (Levi-Strauss system of exchange is general and includes language within it.) Between what distinguishes a thing and what constitutes a thing there can be no clear difference. (The piece of paper cut so that sound-image and concept take the ‘same shape’.)
The sign is sometimes ambiguous. It tends to be absorbed entirely into the sf. Saussure wanted at all costs to avoid this tendency. A distinctive unit is the phoneme—it has no meaning in itself. (In American Spanish there are only 21 distinctive units but 100,000 significant units.) A significant unit is a word—a unit with a meaning.
A sign is sf and sd; expression and content. On each plane there are two strata: form and substance.
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